Monday, October 26, 2015

Tertullian was a conspiracy theorist: propaganda and irrationalism in Roman times and in ours

The Romans knew well the dark art that we call "propaganda" today. As an example, this image, from the Trajan column in Rome, shows Dacian women torturing naked Roman prisoners; it was part of the demonization of the enemy during the Dacian campaign of the early 2nd century AD. However, with the gradual decline of the Empire, its propaganda was becoming more and more shrill and unrealistic. Christian thinkers such as Tertullian were reacting against the absurdity of the official propaganda by contrasting it with ideas that at the time were regarded as even more absurd.

Quintus Septimius Tertullianus (anglicized as "Tertullian", ca. 150 - ca. 230) was one of the early fathers of Christianity. Of his numerous works, we often remember a sentence that reads "Credo quia absurdum." (I believe it, because it is absurd). This exact phrase doesn't exist in Tertullian's works, but it describes well the essence of his way of thinking. He and the other Christians of that time were proposing something truly absurd: that a virgin had given birth to the son of God, that God was at the same time one and three, and that the son of a Jewish carpenter who had been executed as a common criminal was, actually, one of the three!

Almost two thousand years of diffusion of these concepts made them familiar to us and we don't see them as absurd any more. But think of how they would be perceived in Roman times: they were the very essence of absurdity, especially in a world steeped in the rigorous and rational way of thinking typical of the Greek schools of phylosophy. Nevertheless, there is a logic even in absurdity and, in upholding these concepts, Tertullian was reacting to an even greater absurdity: the very existence of the Roman Empire.

The official truth of the Roman propaganda was that the prosperity of the empire was the result of the favor of the Gods, who rewarded the Romans for their moral virtues, their courage, and the fact that they never failed to perform the proper rituals and to offer the required sacrifices. But all that was clearly becoming more and more in contrast with reality: at the time of Tertullian, the Roman Empire was not anymore the glorious war machine it had been in earlier times. Now, it was more like a zombie; a monstrous creature stumbling onward while desperately trying to hold itself in one piece against the attacks coming from the Barbarians outside and from rebellions inside. The official truth about the favor of the Gods had become a joke; a silly and cruel joke that nobody found funny any longer.

Tertullian died before the start of the third century crisis that saw the empire nearly disintegrating in a series of military defeats, civil wars, economic collapse, and currency devaluation. But, surely, the symptoms were all there much earlier and Tertullian could not miss that there was something rotten in the Roman Empire of his time. Indeed, he was possibly the first writer in history to identify what we call today "overpopulation," when he wrote in his "Apology" that

...our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can
hardly supply us from its natural elements; our wants grow more and more
keen, and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, whilst Nature fails
in affording us her usual sustenance. In very deed, pestilence, and
famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for
nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race.

It was not just Tertullian perceiving the problem and, as a result, the Empire was being swept by a wave of new religious creeds, all of them reacting against the official Pagan beliefs. Christianity was seen as an especially virulent sect, and it was the object of a strong repression on the part of the authorities. If Tertullian had been living today, he would be called a terrorist. But he, like many others, was just reacting to the increasing shrill and absurd official propaganda of his times.

Now, let's fast forward to our times. What does our Imperial propaganda tell us about our prosperity? It is not any more attributed to the favor of the Pagan Gods, but to a deity we call "Science," often endowed with attributes termed "progress" and "innovation". Our Imperial armies don't give thanks any more to the Pagan Gods for their victories, but rather attribute them to semi-divine spirits that we call "smart weapons" and which are bestowed on us by the main deity, Science. And our prosperity is attributed to the ability of science to provide better and slicker tools allowing us to attain the eternal bliss of economic growth.

But all this is showing evident signs of fatigue, to say the least. The prosperity of the empire we call "Globalization" is rapidly disappearing and the dark menaces of climate change and resource depletion are upon us. Now, we are told that we did everything wrong and we are told that by those same people, the scientists, who have taken us to where we are. We are told that our smart phones, our shiny cars, our wonder drones can't save us; that our economic growth can't last forever, that the years of prosperity are getting to an end. How can that be? What kind of cruel joke is being played on us?

The result is a rabid reaction that takes different forms, but that normally takes as its main target science, or what's sometimes called "official science". Science, some seem to conclude, must be betraying us and the scientists must be traitors. It can't be that crude oil is running out; it must really be abundant, being continuously recreated in the entrails of the earth by mysterious abiotic processes. And it can't be that we are destroying ourselves by burning fossil fuels; no, climate science can only be a hoax played on us by evil scientists seeking fat research grants for themselves. And how can it be that the same people who can make a smartphone can't make a fusion reactor work? No, that can't be: they are hiding from us the fact that nuclear fusion can easily be obtained inside a huffing and puffing desktop device that looks like (and actually is) a water boiler.

Many people seem to be starting to see science not just as a hoax, but as something truly evil, as when the ancient Christians had turned the Pagan Gods into devils and evil spirits. And so we see the spreading of conspiracy theories: from the idea that the water vapor emitted from airplane engines is in reality a deadly cocktail of poisons designed to kill us, to the attempt to demonstrate that no human astronaut ever walked on the Moon. It is the rise of the "New Irrationalism," a movement of thought still officially ignored, but growing.

Perhaps, had Tertullian lived in our times, he, too, would maintain that the lunar landing had been a hoax and that the planes we see flying over our heads are there to spread poisons in the air. Then, we would call him a conspiracy theorist. But his ideas gained ground within a dying empire and, about one one century afterward, Emperor Constantine ordered the Christian symbol, a cross, to be painted on the flags of his army. He was hoping that the new Christian God would play the role of the old Pagan Gods; a new daimonthat would grant him victory. Constantine won his battle, but that changed little to the destiny of the Empire. When Rome fell to the Visigoths, in 410 A.D., it was left to another Christian thinker, Augustine of Hippo, to explain in his "De Civitate Dei" (The City of God) that the purpose of Christianity never was that of saving a rotten empire.

In the end, empires are just constructions of the human mind; structures that persist for times long enough that some people tend to endow them with the virtue of eternal life: Rome was said to be the "eternal city" and our empire seems to be based on the idea that economic growth can last forever. But empires come and go in cycles, they are as impermanent as the morning dew; they just last a little longer. So, we are going to follow the example of the Roman Empire in its descent toward disappearance. And it may well be that, up to the last moment, we'll hope that some scientific miracle will save us. Then, it will be the task of someone, in the future, to explain that the purpose of Science never was that of saving a rotten empire.

Hello! This is Ugo Bardi - I tend to overextend myself on the Web by writing a lot of stuff. Presently, my blog in English is titled "Cassandra's Legacy". In English, I have another blog a little more esoteric, titled Chimeras. The first is dedicated to sustainability, the second to mythology, history, and art. See also my latest book, "The Seneca Effect," Springer 2017.

10 comments:

This is for me the hardest part to come to terms with, the anti-science pro conspiracy theory attitude of today's collapsing society. Especially since women tend to become more oppressed, either through discussions about limiting abortion or in worst case being stoned for adultery (like in Saudi or by ISIS).

So many of the pieces that make up our political economy, government, healthcare, military actions, are based on fraudulent premises and many of these scams that the average U.S. citizen is forced to engage with on a frequent basis are in fact hostile and intentional. The result, I believe, is that a reasonably intelligent but perhaps not highly educated individual can come to assume everything is, in fact, a scam of some sort including science. Once you have discarded the scientific process then, well, almost anything is possible and testing is irrelevant because, at any rate, the testers would all be scam artists as well. So chemtrails, abiotic oil, Satanic Mason lodges and what have you are all just grist for the mill. My question is at what point does the lack of faith in anything begin to pose a real problem for getting real things done and I think we are already very close to that point.

This is an excellent essay. Bravo, Ugo! I think that our esteemed writer and cultural historian John Michael Greer would be touched as well. It is the eternal difficulty of educated persons to discover the means to effect non-rational forces using the rationality of logical thought. It is perhaps a futile effort but a noble cause.

Thanks, Marc. It seems that some of us find that the key of the current events can be found in the past; and it is a fascinating journey that of looking at the Roman Empire as a mirror in which to see ourselves. But we keep doing all the same mistakes of the past; there seems to be little that can be done to avoid that

Seems that way. I don't know anyone specifically and I wonder if you know anyone specifically or this is just a popular thing to say. Plain to see some things that are called science are flawed. Bill Nye's experiment with CO2 in glass jars is a failed experiment because infrared cannot penetrate the glass jars; so is it "science"? To the extent he should have known that using a heat lamp on a jar containing CO2 was not equivalent to Earth's atmosphere it is at best "bad science".

Websites give unusual strength to the voice of a minority; but sometimes the minority is correct (Wegener's Continental Drift theory) and sometimes, maybe often, wrong (Flat Earth Society). I remember advocates of the "Land of Mu" when I was a teenager. I'm glad I didn't take passage to the North Pole seeking it.

Its a good post and it makes me think that it is almost certainly a fact that all human societies throughout all of human history have been filled with and chiaraterized by tons of so called irrationality (normal human "rational" thinking perhaps? ) propaganda, illusions, delusions, and reciprocal lies and myths of all types and in the smallest to the largest of human affairs. But somehow this time it seems different. Are we really coming to the end of the line and of all the fun and games? Only time will tell. In the meantime I guess that those of us who are free (meaning not locked up in a physical prison) can count our blessings that we are not rotting in a jail in solitary confinement 24 hours a day, seven long days and nights a week and for years on end in the name of something called Justice. Don't really know why I thought of that. But maybe the fact that I did means there is some hope?

Ugo Bardi's blog

This blog deals with the future of humankind in view of such things as the overexploitation of natural resourecs and the effects of global warming. It is a bit catastrophistic, I know, but, after all, the ancient prophetess, Cassandra (above in a painting by Evelyn de Morgan) turned out to have been right!

Follow by Email

Subscribe To

Listen! for no more the presage of my soul, Bride-like, shall peer from its secluding veil; But as the morning wind blows clear the east,More bright shall blow the wind of prophecy,And I will speak, but in dark speech no more.(Aeschylus, Agamemnon)

The Seneca Effect

The Seneca Effect: is this what our future looks like?

Chimeras: another blog by UB

Another blog by Ugo Bardi; it is dedicated to art, myths, literature, and history with a special attention to ancient monsters and deities.

Rules of the blog

I try to publish at least a post every week, typically on Mondays, but additional posts often appear on different days. Comments are moderated: no insults, no hate, no trolls. You may reproduce my posts as you like, citing the source is appreciated!

About the author

Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. Contact: ugo.bardi(whirlything)unifi.it